“Harry,” Luke shook himself and touched the black-winged arm, “shall we show them a thing or two?”
Slowly they started up the road.
Properly, absorbed in care, they prepared to bury Luke Lampson’s mother on the bluff. The body, not changed the least five hours after death, strong as ever in constitution, had spent no time in the Lampson cabin but waited for interment helplessly by the side of the grave. That morning she had predicted hail. Luke spoke for them all: “We better cart her over before it starts.”
But a calm settled on them when the spot was reached, firm sight of the trench fixed narrowly in the ground determining each to take his time. They made allowance for the storm. Deliberate movements and dry throats, long faces and speculation lengthened the afternoon and suspended the effects of sun and cloud. Her last word done — Luke sent a message with the body — no argument was given in the presence of his mother and not a memory nor bitter sentiment invoked. Each suggestion, and members of the party wished to express no more, was wrapped in several minutes’ contemplation and answered in silence by those immediate to the dead.
Hattie Lampson wanted to cause no trouble. After her prediction, coming at the time it did and despite the morning sun, was taken as more than a warning and caused Luke to walk far in the empty lots for horses, she forced quiet even upon herself and attempted to appear asleep. But the eye of a woman who felled eagles with a rifle and downed them to bounce in the dust with heads smashed by a single dum-dum bullet, fluttered and refused to flatten permanently until she spoke:
“Don’t leave me about this house. Just put me over Mulge, just lie me so as I can look down on him.”
Her surviving son’s old friends, receiving the actual remains among them and charged with picking the location, repeated the message to each other several times until they straightened her on the ground they thought she meant and dug beside her. They sighted along shovels and determined that she hover where she wished.
“Do you think she might find it better down aways?”
“She can’t be fooled. There’s just one proper view of him. She knowed that, even when she ain’t been up this way for months.”
They nodded and neatly tamped the sides of the grave. The distance between the words that came from her own mouth and the choice they finally made, by disturbing the earth, was great. But once at work, cutting a thin cube and shoveling a place that would be ringed round with visitors ever after — since she was specifically located and he was not and few wanted to traipse a whole mile and perhaps not even find him — they felt her satisfied and spoke no more about it. They were the artisans, even less concerned with her long life than the lawfully compassioned who gathered as quickly as they could and stayed until the burial, when ended, brought a hasty darkness following on the edge of the storm.